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This November, Montreal voters have an unenviable task of deciding who should be the city’s next mayor. So far, the main contenders are Gérald Tremblay, his party badly tarnished by scandal but still itching for a third term, or Louise Harel, the former Parti Québécois cabinet minister who shepherded in divisive megacity legislation and imagines her rudimentary English won’t be an obstacle to running a major cosmopolitan city.

In Ottawa, the federal Liberals basically handed the party’s top job to Michael Ignatieff, a dashing academic who has spent most of his adult life on another continent – this after discovering their first choice lacked the street smarts and pizzazz needed to rally the troops.

Faraway wars, a cratering economy and multinational corporations such as General Motors going down the toilet all fuel the craving for inspirational, competent and trustworthy take-charge people who can lead us out of the woods.

Meanwhile, the arrival of a dynamic leader south of the border has stirred up a bad case of Obama envy.

Maybe you don’t notice what you haven’t got until you see that someone else has it.

So where have all the leaders gone?

Are leaders born or made – and are they even necessary in the age of the Internet, when access to most government policies and documents is only a keystroke away? What does leadership have to do with your gender and birth order?

Is it really so difficult to find good folks for whom public service is more than an opportunity to puff themselves up or line their pockets?

And what would it take to woo, coax, wheedle, badger or cajole smart, honest and imaginative people to step up?

***

It was 1974, Expo 67 was a glittery memory and Montrealers were only beginning to grasp the enormity of the Olympic boondoggle born of Jean Drapeau’s one-man show.

A coalition of community and union activists and left-leaning politicians from both sides of the Main joined ranks to create the Montreal Citizens’ Movement. A 28-year-old Louise Harel was there. So was Gazette columnist Nick Auf der Maur, Bob Keaton, a teacher at Dawson College and Michael Fainstat, an engineer from Notre Dame de Grâce.

Increasingly frustrated with stonewalling and autocratic rule, the MCM was determined to do politics differently, to bring a new grassroots, people-centric ethos to city hall. That fall, the team elected 18 opposition councillors, who began chipping away at Drapeau’s autocratic régime, demanding public hearings, question period and greater accountability to the taxpayers.

But their union was frail and eventually splintered along linguistic, district and federalist-sovereignist lines. By November 1978, only Auf der Maur, the rambunctious gadfly, and the relentless Fainstat were left in council chambers, hammering, filibustering and holding the fort.

In 1986, a resurgent MCM led by Jean Doré seized city hall, the first in a line of city administrations that rejected the megalomania and unrealistic expectations of the Drapeau era – but also lacked the panache and vision.

***

Harold Chorney, a political economist at Concordia University who has run, unsuccessfully, for public office, says the election of Barack Obama has got people thinking about the nature of leadership and the qualities they’d like to see in their own politicians, bosses and community organizers.

“Clearly, Barack Obama is very popular, a new version of the Churchillian model. Here is someone who is brave and brilliant, who has new ideas and challenges people – but is also a master of new technologies, which make it possible for him to reach out to the next generation,” said Chorney.

“He’s very popular in Canada. … We are feeling somewhat deprived. With the greatest respect to Michael Ignatieff, he’s not Obama.”

“Tremblay is an interesting guy, but his party is badly damaged and he has a major scandal on his hands.”

Harel, his most serious opponent – the one with the party machine to fall back on – is an old PQ minister, a fact which Chorney says is sure to alienate anglo and allophone voters.

“It’s a fairly gloomy scenario. How do you vote for a candidate whose party has been tainted by scandal? But the alternative is a voice from the past,” he said.

“It’s a big, big predicament for voters like the ones who read The Gazette.”

Laurent Lapierre isn’t as troubled as Chorney by Harel’s entry into the mayoralty race. Now at least, he says, the campaign will be interesting. But Lapierre, who holds the Pierre Péladeau chair in leadership at École des Hautes études Commerciales (HEC Montréal), doesn’t think either of the front-runners has what Montreal needs to shake things up and bolster its image as a place where big things happen and ideas flourish.

“Louise Harel is not going to get anyone excited by talking about the recentralization of government,” said Lapierre. “Harel and Tremblay are not the ones who will give Montreal vision.”

“What Montreal lacks is someone with vision and a take-charge personality,” he said, citing the spectacular success of Quebec City’s 400th anniversary festivities under the leadership of its new mayor, Régis Labeaume, who took the helm after the sudden death of the previous mayor in 2007. Why, Lapierre asks, can’t Montreal seize the day, by encouraging Cirque de Soleil to set up a permanent show here or by commissioning long-running shows by Robert Lepage?

Then there’s Toronto, which outstripped Montreal on the economic front more than 40 years ago and is now dominating on the artistic and cultural front, evident in massive public and private investments in the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other venues. Even tiny Stratford is able to maintain four theatres that mount 16 shows a year.

“Compared with that, what you get in Montreal is pretty drab and beige, colourless,” Lapierre said. “Yes, we have festivals, but nothing of a high calibre that puts us on the map like Stratford or the National Ballet. My wish would be for someone with a real cultural vision for the city, so that someone could visit here for a week and say they did five or six fantastic things.”

So what are the qualities that make up a true leader, and where is this dynamo supposed to come from?

“A really transformational leader has a vision of how he or she wants things to be in three or four years, and an idea of how to get there,” says Steven Appelbaum, a management professor at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, where he specializes in managing change and deviant employee behaviour.

Appelbaum studies leadership and corporate governance, distinguishing between truly toxic executives and politicians and those who are simply inept – yet still able to disguise their short-comings long enough to get generous severance packages and move on to a corner office somewhere else.

Appelbaum’s ideal leader is a cut above the transactional leader, the kind of boss who can handle day-to-day decisions but flounders when it comes to blue-sky thinking or loping off a limb that threatens to bring everyone else down.

His transformational leaders do more than look into the future and offer a vision that’s believable. They know how to sell their ideas, recruit bright people who are eager to work with them and serve as a role model that others want to emulate.

“Smart leaders are about what the customer wants,” Appelbaum said. “Good leaders empower others and let them do the work.”

***

But in today’s knowledge-based societies, when so much information about policy and services is only an Internet connection away – provided the website is working that day – what we expect from leaders may be changing.

“In the new context, the age of knowledge-work, would-be leaders can’t get people to follow them in ways that worked in the past,” cautions psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby in his book The Leaders We Need and What Makes Us Follow, published last year.

The director of McGill University’s department of translation studies, James Archibald, was part of the Canadian delegation to a world summit on the information society in Dubai last month. Using Montreal, Quebec and Canada as models, he argued that e-government and e-services foster greater citizen knowledge and participation in government by making it easier to know what services are available and how to use them. Archibald couples this with the city’s new charter of rights and responsibilities – a McGIll team was instrumental in translating the text into Spanish and will oversee translation into Arabic – as examples of how lines between leaders and electorate may be blurring.

A staunch champion of Tremblay, Archibald suggests the charter reflects the mayor’s vision of Montreal “as a city where the ‘citizens’ are part of process. They’re not just people who pay taxes and take out their garbage. I think his vision of Montreal is to establish a real dynamic where people are committed to the city and the city in turn shows a commitment to them. So it’s a two-way street.”

At a time when workers are often as educated and plugged in as their bosses, old-style notions of a leader as a father figure to look up to don’t wash anymore, says Maccoby, who teaches at Oxford University and the U.S. Brookings Institution.

HEC Montréal’s Lapierre agrees. “A Drapeau could not happen now.”

***

Blema Steinberg, a psychoanalyst in private practice who also happens to be an emeritus professor in political science at McGill University, sees differences in the way the two sexes approach leadership.

In a study of 79 women who have held their country’s top jobs since 1960, Steinberg was intrigued to see how few female leaders had an older brother. “What we found was a very strong correlation between female leaders and being the first born, an only child or else having an older sister,” said Steinberg, whose 2008 book Women in Power focused on the personality traits and life experiences that helped propel Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi to seek their country’s top jobs.

“In female leaders, the leadership qualities were paramount – assertive, strong-mindedness, a belief in themselves and in their efficacy, a certain intolerance for opinions that differed from theirs,” she said. “You don’t see that to the same extent in male leaders. They are more likely to be characterized by ambitiousness, arrogance, conceit, a willingness to shade the truth to save themselves – think of Bill Clinton. There’s a level of narcissism you don’t always see in female leaders.”

Steinberg said women who seek high office also tend to be extremely goal-oriented. While a man may enter the race because he believes in the machinery of government and wants it to run smoothly, “it’s unlikely to get a woman running for office without a clear initiative or objective in mind,” Steinberg said. “Despite what you might hear, women aren’t there because they want some warm cosy environment.”

A life-long Montrealer, Steinberg would love to see a strong presence at city hall pushing for the kind of services and facilities that suburbanites take for granted. “Municipal government should be a springboard for higher office, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way much, except in a few big American cities,” she said.

“As intrusiveness of the press and demands for greater transparency have increased, some of the attractiveness of going into politics has gone. On the municipal level there is never enough money to do everything and it difficult to attract the best people. … The result is that what you often get are people who are not that competent or who may see it as … a way of fattening their wallets.”

“Leaders aren’t exactly waiting on every street corner,” said Lapierre. “Obama came along at a time when the reputation of the United States had never been worse, much like Churchill who arrived in a time of catastrophe.”

Even when you do find someone who seems to have the right stuff – he cites former police chief Jacques Duchesneau’s unsuccessful run for mayor – it takes time, money and backing from the party to make it happen. “Politics has become a machine.”

Done properly, it’s also a helluva lot of work.

“Politics is a thankless task,” said Chorney, an unsuccessful candidate who ran for Pierre Bourque’s Vision Montreal in November 2000.

“Despite what people many think – that it is a way to make a fast buck – there’s not much glory. And it doesn’t matter how smart you are or how much you know, you are not guaranteed to win. People get their information in the strangest ways, whether it is something they saw online or what they heard on the golf course.”

On the national level, the stakes and challenges are even bigger.

“There ought to be people willing and able to take charge, who have vision but also an understanding of the history and complexity of issues,” he said. “But Canada is an extremely complicated country – with a small population, huge land mass, long winters. It’s not an easy country to govern.”

Appelbaum recalls a recent television interview he saw in which the new U.S. president was describing the nightmarish aspects of his new job, where the work day begins at 7 and ends at 10 and he can’t even take his kids out for ice cream without a phalanx of camera crews.

He likens the dream of wanting to be president, prime minister or the head of a multinational to his youthful wish to have a beautiful actress.

“The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘What, are you crazy?’ Well, this is a Marilyn Monroe fantasy.”

pcurran@thegazette.canwest.com

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